Hey, could you please not post flamewar comments to HN? You've got good points here, but unfortunately the nastiness of the last sentence overrides them.
Also, please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. Doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Even if you take the three biggest EU economies (Germany, France and Italy) you're still off by over $20k per capita vs the US (at over $60k).
And ironically out of these three Germany has the highest per capita and they're the only one to have merged with an Eastern block country.
Portugal has already fallen behind Slovenia.
The only EU countries to have anything approaching or surpassing US per capita numbers have tiny populations. In which case one might mention NY state has a per capita gdp of $85k with over 8M people.
What I mean is that most Europeans are fine, comparatively to Americans, and don't actually need to let tech giants intrude every aspect of their lives for the sake of growing their economy.
Seriously, do you think everyone would be up in arms if facebook microsoft and amazon pulled out? No, people would just shrug and move on to something else.
No this doesn't tell the full picture because the gap is the same for company like germany where the GDP per capita in 2008 was 45k and now is 48k. In 2008 the US was 46k and is now 63k.
The rate that these economies are diverging is the problem. Its to the point that the 50 million americans in horrid proverty are richer than the middle class in countries like spain, italy, greece.
GDP per capita isn't that insightful for this topic because it doesn't tell whether disposable income actually grew. It could also be the case that i.e. only the top 1% household income grew.
Median household income is a better metric to get a feeling for the live of the actual, average citizen. Median personal income in the EU grew 18.5% from 2008 to 2018 and 8.7% in the US. (It grew more in 2019 but I couldn't find the corresponding EU data for 2019).
The divergence from GDP per capita means most people didn't receive the growth in productivity.
Yeh in the EU in general it grew but that doesn't actually answer you first questions and it obfuscates the growing difference. This is because the EU as a whole because of the easter bloc country was growing from a much much smaller number.
But if you actually look at disposable income germany has nearly 10k less than the US. Thats not even to mention places like greece, Portugal, and spain.
German median personal income grew by 21% from 2008 to 2018, as per my original link.
My overall point was that GDP per capita growth does not relate to income of actual people, though.
The difference between both metrics means that mostly only inequality grew in the US from 2008 to 2018.
I think you looked at mean income in the wikipedia table, not median income. Median income is "only" 7k less in Germany than the US. The difference between mean and median essentially tells the same story: GDP growths only landed in the upper few percent housholds.
Look at China's example, their GDP per capita increased by 300% in the same time span. Suddenly they started being seen as a threat, companies banned, broken up, forced to be sold. This move is probably motivated partly by similar reasons and is indirectly supported by the fact that the US considered this a viable strategy.
The other reason this is being considered is the deep distrust of US tech companies. For the average literate European citizen, US tech companies probably look just as bad as Chinese companies look for the average literate US citizen. Again this is indirectly supported by US reacting in the exact same way towards the party they distrust.
This being said I don't think this will pass and it certainly won't be put to use any time soon. There are still to many strings attached from the US to European countries, economies, and people. The purpose of all that spying and infiltrating everyone is to keep both allies and enemies in check. But recent US moves and changing of times have created some very obvious cracks that won't get mended too easily.
1. Much of the gap is due to former Eastern-bloc countries
2. 50 million of Americans live in horrid poverty
I guess it's hard to get the full picture when you get a cushy six-figure tech job in the Bay area.